Los Angeles native Mike Stilkey has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. Using a mix of ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. A lingering sense of loss and longing hints at emotional depth and draws the viewer into their introspective thrall with a mixture of capricious poetry, wit, and mystery. (Photo by Mike Stilkey)

In this July 12, 2007 file photo, a two-day-old piping plover runs along a beach in the Quonochontaug Conservation Area in Westerly, R.I. (Photo by Steven Senne/AP Photo)

Indigenous woven backpacks called guayare are seen in front of a house in Paraitepui village, before a walking excursion to Mount Roraima, near Venezuela's border with Brazil January 13, 2015. A mysterious table-topped mountain on the Venezuela-Brazil border that perplexed 19th century explorers and inspired “The Lost World” novel is attracting ever more modern-day adventurers. (Photo by Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

In this photograph taken on October 4, 2016, an Afghan baker prepares bread at his shop as he waits for customers in Lashkar Gah, the capital city of Helmand province. For years Helmand was the centerpiece of the Western military intervention in Afghanistan only for it to slip deeper into a quagmire of instability, with almost the entire southern province teetering on the verge of collapse. Intensified fighting has killed hundreds and forced thousands to flee to besieged capital Lashkar Gah, sparking a humanitarian crisis as the city – one of the last government- held enclaves – risks falling to the Taliban' s repeated ferocious assaults. (Photo by Wakil Kohsar/AFP Photo)

People look at huge waves crashing on the San Esteban de Pravia seafront, northern Spanish region of Asturias February 8, 2016. (Photo by Eloy Alonso/Reuters)

Ivan Shamyanok, 90, shaves in his house in the village of Tulgovichi, near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, Belarus March 15, 2016. “My sister lived here with her husband. They decided to leave and soon enough they were in the ground ... They died from anxiety. I'm not anxious. I sing a little, take a turn in the yard, take things slowly like this and I live”, he said. (Photo by Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

Students from St Andrews University indulge in a tradition of covering themselves with foam to honour the “academic family” on the lower college lawn on October 23, 2017, in St Andrews, Scotland. (Photo by Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images)

A long-tailed monkey, wearing jeans and a doll's head perform on the streets of Boyolali, Central Java Indonesia. Primates are used by owners to beg at crossroads, the primate show can earn $ 5 per day. Begging using long-tailed monkeys is opposed by animal lovers community as it is considered to torture and degrade animal health. (Photo by Arief Setiadi/Pacific Press/Barcroft Images)